"another day in america" - laurie anderson

Recently the moon has been incredible, huge and glowing, lighting up the garden, lighting up the kitchen, where I sometimes sit, late at night, just looking up at the sky. A week or so back, just to the left of the moon, was an extra bright dot in the sky. That was Jupiter, more than 100 times bigger than our Earth. How amazing to see that!

I love looking up at the stars, the more you look, the more you see. It's astonishing to think that these stars are so many millions of miles away, lightyears away, bafflingly vast distances, yet we can still see them, though they are completely untouchable and unknowable.

On her wonderful 2010 album Homeland, (an album that everyone should have a copy of), Laurie Anderson has an amazing track called "Another Day In America". Narrated by the Voice Of Authority, Fenway Bergamot, (a pitch shifted Laurie, speaking in a newsreader type voice) over indescribably sad, thoughtful swirls and drones, this always makes me very reflective and oddly calm. 

After touching on such weighty topics as "what are days for?" (the answer, "to put between the endless nights") or Kierkegaard's theory that this world can only really be understood if life was to be lived backwards ("which would entail an incredible amount of planning... and confusion..."), Laurie then talks about the stars. In these violent and turbulent times, I, like Laurie, find it comforting to look up at the stars, celestial bodies that are forever, permanent, regardless of what madness goes on, down here on Earth.

But she concludes that bit of the piece with these words that I find deeply ominous and desperately sad...

"And you know the reason I really love the stars is that we cannot hurt them.
We can't burn them or melt them or make them overflow.

We can't flood them or blow them up or turn them out.
But we are reaching for them.
We are reaching for them."

john cale - music for a new society (and other things)

For some reason I woke up recently with John Cale's "Chinese Envoy" rattling around my brain. 

 

So I played Music For A New Society. Which is equal parts beautiful and scary. Some of the pieces are positively unhinged ("Sanities" and "In The Library Of Force" are especially worrying), but the simple rework of "Close Watch" is stunning (though I could do without the bagpipes at the end…) and "Chinese Envoy" is perfectly lovely. Incidentally the track "Sanities" was actually called "Sanctus" but the people doing the record sleeve couldn't read Cale's writing and somehow it ended up being called "Sanities" - which Cale then thought was a better title, despite not actually being a word! 

 

The full band rock song "Changes Made" probably shouldn't be here - it's a fine song, but was included only at the insistence of the record label who wondered if Cale could at least include just one a 'proper' song. Cale actually felt sorry for them, and so, as the rest of New Society was so uncompromising, he agreed to record one regular song... It would fit far better on the previous album Honi Soit or the following record Caribbean Sunset.

 

Anyway, New Society remains a favourite Cale album of mine, despite it being the work of a paranoid raving loony and being generally unlikeable, scary, depressing and eerie... 

 

Then, a few weeks ago Cale released M:FANS - a brand new reworking of Music For A New Society and it's (mostly) very good. Extremely different from the original album - which I suppose is rather the point. 

 

Some of the tracks are perhaps a little overladen with electronics and effects - "Sanctus" and "Library Of Force" for example, and I'm really not sure about the new "Close Watch". But the best tracks are a little cleaner and more direct - "Chinese Envoy" has become a sort of Talking Heads-ish dance track, which is really excellent and is, for me, the highlight of the album, and "Broken Bird" is now a straightforward piano ballad. There are two versions of "If You Were Still Around" one of which was recorded a couple of years ago after Lou Reed's death (and was the catalyst which suggested to Cale that reworking the whole album might be viable). I prefer the second one with the choir, the first is perhaps a little too overwrought for me. 

 

It'll need a few more listens, but this has always been a dark and slightly worrisome album, and these new versions don't dispel that feeling at all. Cale's voice is still very strong, and his desire to push the boundaries shows no sign of easing up. Thank goodness.

 

After the original New Society Cale stepped back from the abyss and delivered two more albums (and a throwaway live record) before he totally cleaned up. 1983's Caribbean Sunset  is still fairly paranoid, but at least Cale sounds like he's actually having a bit of fun on this album, not on the verge of blowing his brains out... It's got an oddly commercial sheen to it, some of the songs really rock, hard, and the title track is so delicately pretty. Oddly, this album has never received a CD release as Cale obviously has some issues with it. Yet, even more oddly, some of the songs (like "Model Beirut Recital" and "Magazines") have cropped up numerous times in Cale live sets over the years, so he must like some it, at least...

 

In 1985 he issued the somewhat unloved Artificial Intelligence. It's actually rather poorly recorded and produced, which is quite unusual for a John Cale record - the whole thing seems weirdly lop sided and astonishingly clunky, but the bulk of this songs are very good. 

 

In fact, once you get past the lumpy production "Dying On The Vine" is surely one of Cale's best ever songs. The lyrics are wonderful, hinting at some sort of spy drama in a hot foreign land. "Meet me when all the shooting's over… you can bring all your friends along for protection…the authorities say my papers are all in order, and if I wasn't such a coward I would run", but as ever with Cale's songs, the lyrics are vividly evocative, of something or other, but delightfully unspecific when it comes to details. 

 

Elsewhere, tracks like "Fadeaway Tomorrow" and "Satellite Walk" represent Cale's attempt at a top forty type song (though no-one bought it, possibly because no-one knew what "I took my tomahawk for a satellite walk" meant - the 12" 'dance' mix isn't noticeably any dancier either…), but "Black Rose" is lovely (and was the title song until Cale changed his mind at the very last minute requiring a total rethink to the cover - hence the horrid drawing we ended up with, which was really looks like it was done at the 11th hour). And the marvellous opening track "Everytime The Dogs Bark" hints at the paranoid ranting Cale of yesteryear. 

 

During the recording of this album (done at the same time and with the same musicians as Nico's Camera Obscura, fact fans) Cale's daughter Eden was born. Seemingly overnight Cale cleaned himself up. Gone were the frightening number of whisky bottles, gone were the narcotics that kept him up for days at a time while he scoured the news for evidence to back up his paranoid political conspiracy theories. Now sober, he took up squash and tennis (with the same fanatical devotion as he once given to his drinking), and once his live commitments were over in 1985 he took the next four years off, to be with his wife and daughter. He only emerged from his retirement in 1989 when Brian Eno suggested recording the Falklands Suite (which Cale had written in 1982 soon after the War) with a Russian orchestra - that then lead to Wrong Way Up and, fortunately, loads more Cale albums. 

random tunes on thursday

With the iPod on shuffle, this is what I've heard today...

 

Some moody Doctor Who music from Tom Baker's second story The Ark In Space. Lovely stuff from Who's regular composer Dudley Simpson. This guy worked wonders, creating compelling atmospheres from a small group of, mainly, woodwind players.

Iggy Pop - "Five Foot One" live in 1979. A really strong performance - the band featured the cream of UK punk - Glen Matlock from the Pistols and Brian James from the Damned, and they were a superb foil for some of Iggy's most impassioned stage shows.

Giles Giles and Fripp - "The Crukster" - a weird spoken word thing with some impossible, frantic guitar runs underneath the narration. Bonkers. And almost unbelievable that within a year, these guys would have effectively morphed into King Crimson.

Zappa Plays Zappa - a live, note perfect rendition of the fiendishly difficult "RDNZL". Breathtaking stuff. You'd think the percussion alone would take years to master!

Tim Bowness / Peter Chilvers - "Winter With You" - the sparser version from Overstrand and quite possibly one of the best songs in the world. Really. Absolutely stunning. Brings me to tears almost every time.  

Lou Reed / John Cale - "Open House" - I'd forgotten how good the Songs For Drella album can be. When Lou was on form there was almost no-one to beat him, and this is cracking. Superbly arranged too, thanks to John Cale, and with beautifully pitched vocals. 

Harold Budd / Robin Guthrie - something with impossibly pretty piano and shimmery guitars, you know how it sounds...  

Daniel Lanois / Emmylou Harris - "May This Be Love" live in 1995 on the Wrecking Ball tour. Gorgeous. These two should work together some more - they bring out the absolute best in each other. Emmylou's voice is so lovely on this Hendrix song and Dan and the band kick up a firestorm of noise behind her.

Iggy again - "Dog Food" also live in 1979 but a really shambolic performance. Iggy's obviously somewhat, er, distracted and whereas he's usually spot on with his vocals (even when he's ingested enough stimulants to send him to another planet), here he's missing cues and just splurging the vocals out wherever he wants, regardless of the structure of the song. A right mess.

David Bowie - "And I Say To Myself". I love his 1960s songs; this one is real delight as his backing band the Buzz chant the backing vocals offhandedly back at Dave. Although none of his songs became hits in the 1960s (not until "Space Oddity" at the very end of the decade) it's sometimes hard to fathom why, as most of his songs were catchy and delightful, frequently with a welcome sense of gentle self mockery.

The Pineapple Thief - "Magnolia" - the title song from their 2014 album. It's a really solid record. 12 short snappy grown up rock songs in 45 minutes, which gives the sense that TPT were doing their level best to avoid the Prog Rock tag that frequently follows them). There's a surprising tenderness on this album which was somewhat missing from the more muscular vaguely Radiohead / Muse-ish sound of the previous couple of albums.

And finally...

 

Yet more Iggy! - "Nightclubbing" from The Idiot. In an interview conducted in late 1976 Iggy described the sound of his forthcoming debut solo album as "James Brown meets Kraftwerk". I'd argue that most of The Idiot sounds nothing like that description, except for just one track - "Nightclubbing". Harsh drum machines, big fat synths, but it's also, oddly, impossibly, rather funky. I love the two tiered vocal on the second verse, I love the wailing wah-wahed guitar at the end, it's just a superb track. And a brilliant production too - it sounds like nothing else on Earth.

rambling thoughts - karl bartos

I recently revisited Karl Bartos’ 2013 album Off The Record.

 

The cover has a picture of Karl’s Kraftwerk robot (a move which apparently enraged Ralf Hutter, who tried and failed to get the record withdrawn...). And the KW influences don't stop there.

 

The music itself shows Karl returning very much to the classic KW sound after experimenting with simpler guitar based pop on his previous album. Whilst Bartos’ solo stuff is often not as interesting as the stuff he produced with his old band, it’s still strong and Off The Record represented a sort of rounding up exercise as some of these songs had been knocking around for years and years waiting for Karl to finish them off.

 

Bartos claimed that after 20+ years out of KW he’d obviously moved on, but Off The Record doesn't bear this out. Maybe the excellent opening track “Atomium” shows a much more muscular rhythm track than anything KW would have done, but Karl still relies on the Robovox for the vocals which obviously invites direct comparisons with the Dusseldorf boys. And this direct link crops up throughout the album - for example, many of the drum sounds are identical to those that Karl played when he was KW’s drummer – and, sadly, whenever this happens it’s Karl’s songs that seem to come off as second best. Which is a shame as this is actually a very good collection of synth pop. "Rhythmus" takes this even further, using much of the melody from "Computer World" but seeing as Bartos composed this Kraftwerk melody in the first place, it's probably not too surprising.

 

Karl dips even further into the past with the final track, “Hausmusik”, which has tinny rhythm box percussion and wibbly analogue synth sounds and sounds like Harmonia or Cluster from 40+ years ago! It’s a charmingly simple piece and it’s probably my favourite.  

 

rambling thoughts - revolver

It’s interesting that the first few Beatles albums basically reflect the Fabs' live sets at the time. And Beatles For Sale is like a mopping up record of covers and early tracks before the ground subtly shifts under the band. Help! introduces all sorts of other instrumentation and styles, a trend which really catches on during Rubber Soul, which is an album that I probably prefer to Revolver, mainly because I think the basic songwriting is stronger and more consistent – for me Revolver errs a little too much on the side of experimentation to be quite as enjoyable as Rubber Soul.

 

Having said that, Revolver is still one hell of an album with some delightful songs like “I’m Only Sleeping”, some silly songs (yes, I'm talking to you, "Yellow Submarine"), some bitingly harsh tracks like “Taxman” and the all out insanity of “Tomorrow Never Knows”. And the band was so confident that they could afford to leave off the brilliant “Paperback Writer” as a single and dump the stunning “Rain” on a b side!

 

Perhaps the only track that doesn’t really cut it for me is Macca’s “Got To Get You Into My Life” – it’s not the song, which is really excellent, but the Beatles seem to be the wrong band for this tune. It so badly needs an Otis Redding style soul band, and especially a drummer with more groove than Ringo, who’s usual splatty style is just plain wrong here. I remember that Earth Wind and Fire did a cracking version in the seventies, which I think is actually what the song needed. 

 

Incidentally all my Beatles albums up to and including Revolver are in mono on the iPod. From Pepper onwards they are the stereo versions. Except that I've included “Tomorrow Never Knows” in stereo, with all the tape effects and backwards lunacy coming atcha from every angle. It works brilliantly - we have all of Revolver in glorious mono, powerful, clear and forceful - then the final track, “TNK”, fires up in headsplittingly mad stereo. It just seemed the right way to sequence it. And on headphones the sudden change is wonderful, and like, totally mind expanding. Man…

 

 

kraftwerk - utrecht december 1981

For no obvious reason today's listening started off with part of a Kraftwerk concert from 1981.

This isn't the whole show, sadly, but it's a soundboard recording, which is terrific to have from 1981. Kraftwerk undertook the Computer World Tour across the summer of 1981 but they also played handful of gigs in Germany and the Low Countries in December '81, four months after the main tour had finished. I seem to recall reading something years ago that said these gigs were scheduled at very short notice as the band wanted to road test some major upgrades to the Kling-Klang studio that had been necessary due to wear and tear incurred on the big summer tour. 

 

Whatever the reason this soundboard from Utrecht sounds significantly different from other recordings I have heard from the Computer World Tour. For one thing the band sound more 'live' than at any point since 1975. There's a clear sense of four guys actually playing this music, wrestling with the technology, trying to keep the machinery under control. Ralf and Florian's vocals are noticeably more animated, the drumming is more forceful (and at times actually sounds like Wolfgang is hitting those delicate metal pads really hard) and everything has a far more immediate feel about it.

 

Some songs are rearranged slightly - "Autobahn" is now cut to 12 minutes, but a very busy 12 minutes with Ralf and Florian seemingly improvising and almost scat singing towards the end, which is very unusual. "Radioactivity" is mid way between the slow, stately, measured original (and this was how it had been performed during the summer 1981 dates) and the faster, more urgent Mix version that came at the end of the 1980s. The drumming is especially different.

 

It may have been rather weedy on the album, but this live "Pocket Calculator" rocks. Really. 9 minutes long, it's a stomping powerhouse performance. And we get the only live outing for "Metropolis" until the Katalog shows of the current decade. It's a cracking performance too.  

All in all, one of the very best Kraftwerk live recordings in existence.